


Secrets No More

by james



Series: Secrets We Keep [4]
Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Amusing Interlude, Gen, Humor, Inappropriate Subjects for Baby Ears, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:20:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24242716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/james/pseuds/james
Summary: One month later, things are settling down. Ivan visits the Palace for a pleasant, if slightly damp, afternoon.
Series: Secrets We Keep [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1744738
Comments: 22
Kudos: 83





	Secrets No More

**Author's Note:**

> With regard to Barrayaran history, etc, I am making shit up. I am happy to hear canonical corrections, but not debate interpretations of canon. (Not here, let's do it on DW!) I have skewed Barrayaran culture to imply it might be slightly more accepting of homosexual relationships, but this series is still gen. (For now. I have no idea.)

Technically it wasn't kidnapping if the baby's parents knew what you were doing and the baby's primary nanny and five Imperial Guards assigned to the baby were all following, preceding, and generally making large walls between you and the entire rest of the world, even if “the world” just the Palace.

Ivan wasn't stupid enough to try taking Xav outside the Palace without weeks and weeks of warning even if he'd wanted to. What he wanted today was in one of the historical wings of the Palace, now used for over-flow of guests who ranked below family and above 'people we just want to feel important.' It tended to stand empty except for visits by professors and students of history, as all of the furnishings and decor had been kept intact and well-preserved over the last six centuries.

Not everything had survived the occasional fire due to overthrowing one ruler or another, but restoration made everything look authentic and that was good enough for Ivan.

He shifted Xav in his arms a bit, to make it easier for the boy to see around him if he ever cared to stop playing with the collar of Ivan's shirt. The fabric was wet from being gummed, and Ivan knew the nanny had long-since made a note to start keeping teethers on hand.

It was a comparatively short walk from the nursery to Ivan's goal: a set of rooms near the very center of the Palace, which stood on the grounds of five of the previous Palaces. The current Palace was large enough to encompass the ruins of all previous Palaces, but this particular wing was known to be the oldest. 

It was popularly said that the very first Palace had been constructed on this spot, though Ivan knew that technically the home of the first planetary ruler was about two hundred kilometers to the south. But that hadn't really been a proper Palace, just a smallish mansion where Captain Barra had lived with his family after the colonists had arrived. Vorbarr Sultana hadn't been more than a small port town until some decades after, but when it had become the planet's capital, the first King's Castle had been built on – or near enough that no one could find evidence to dispute it – the very spot where Patrice's Library was now located, just a few meters down the hall.

Ivan didn't care about Patrice's Library. It was dusty and dark, and not at all a good place to entertain a baby for an afternoon. Today was Niklas' regular playdate with both of his parents with no younger sibling in attendance, which usually meant Xav stayed in the nursery while Niklas got to go somewhere exciting like the pond, located within the gardens inside the Palace grounds. Niklas had a great fondness for chasing frogs and trying to collect them in a bucket, an endeavor helped out by the Barrayaran Zoological Society keeping the Palace's pond well-stocked with non-toxic species of frogs.

All of which meant there were no obstacles to Ivan showing up and taking Xav on an adventure of their own. (Ivan knew someone would have sent a message to Gregor and Laisa as soon as he'd arrived at the Palace – one month to the day he'd come in and discovered all kinds of uncomfortable, but ultimately reassuring, things about himself and his relatives.) Life had settled into something of a normalcy, though morning messages to his mother and evening vid calls were starting to get a little tiresome.

There wasn't much he could say except yes, I feel fine, honestly, I actually do feel fine, because it wasn't like his life was very exciting when Miles wasn't dragging him into things, and Miles had been warned off by essentially everyone. The most exciting thing Ivan was doing now was finishing a report early and clearing his inbox.

If his mother wanted to know what he had got done at work that day she could break into his files and take a look herself. Otherwise, his day consisted of an extremely boring but nutritious breakfast, followed by nine hours at work, then coming home with take-out or a readimeal that was nutritionist-approved, and fielding calls from any number of other well-meaning and nosy relatives inquiring as to his health, sanity, and plans for the weekend.

Next month he was going with Mark and Kareen down to the Southern Continent ostensively to help them scout out some land that Mark wanted to do something with. They'd started telling Ivan the details, but Ivan didn't care. It was spring in the southern hemisphere and a lot of vacationeers from everywhere else liked to spend a few weeks at the coast enjoying the weather in as fashionable and skimpy sun attire as the weather permitted.

Ivan could pretend he was helping while they pretended they actually needed help, and everyone else in the clan could be happy that Ivan was getting out and being active, being social, while not also getting into trouble because Miles was forbidden from asking Ivan for favors. 

Right now, though, he was only concerned with the small Prince chewing on his shirt. He gave the boy a kiss on the top of his head as they reached the room he'd been headed for. Of course it would have been kept clean, but ten minutes before he'd mentioned “casually” where he was taking Xav and he knew that several someones would have scrambled here to make sure everything was clean and acceptable for the Prince.

Xav wasn't crawling yet, and Ivan wasn't planning on letting him grab onto anything in the room, so it didn't really need to be baby-proofed, but the Majordomo and the Head of the Nursery and ImpSec and half a dozen others would want to know _for certain_ that the rooms were safe and acceptable.

Ivan had walked slowly, pointing random things out to Xav, so they'd have a few more minutes.

But finally they arrived and when the guard opened the door to check everything before waving them in, the room looked exactly like it ever did. There was the faintest hint of the smell of freshener and the almost-imperceptible static of a monitor still being calibrated from either freshly installed or upgraded.

Ivan would have felt bad about not calling and telling them this morning what his plans were, but scrambling was good practise, he felt, and he was sure that ImpSec would appreciate it.

Well, not really, but Ivan took some tiny bit of glee from it, since he'd got home after his stay at the Palace to find that the security measures in his own flat had been upgraded, and the apartment just below his “mysteriously” contained a new tenant. He didn't think it was more medical staff, as he'd given back the shiny, fancy wristcomm and gotten back his old one. 

Except it wasn't his old one, it was a new, albeit military-issue, model, and he had determined that there was nothing on it he couldn't switch off. It had none of the medical capabilities to send his vital signs to whomever was assigned to watch Ivan be bland and boring and _fine._ What it did have, he'd discovered, was an alert set to register if his vitals went into any range of extremes.

So if he had a really bad panic attack, or night terrors he couldn't wake from, or if he stopped eating again, it would ping someone. Which was probably fair.

There was no one forcing him to wear the thing. His mother had told him it was meant for his own peace of mind and that none of the information was necessarily being shared with anyone except his doctor, but it was there if he wanted it. Ivan knew it would make everyone else feel better and would mean they would leave him alone sooner rather than later, so he'd taken to wearing it if only so he could prove he was all right and would they stop asking, already.

When he headed for the beach he was absolutely leaving it behind. 

“All right, Xav, take a look at this.” He didn't really expect the boy to look, but Xav did turn his head – and looked several meters to the right of where Ivan was pointing. Ivan nodded, seriously. He heard a stifled, amused noise from behind him – probably the nanny but honestly it could have been Lieutenant Vorholtz. The lady in the painting he was facing was a distant relative of the Vorholtzes, as Ivan recalled.

“This is Princess Mora,” he said, and smiled as Xav looked at the painting briefly before grabbing onto Ivan's shirt again.

He was very glad he'd chosen a simple shirt today and that he hadn't come over from work still in uniform. Xav adored all the buttons and braids and pins, but they were decidedly not good for his gums.

“Princess Mora ruled Barrayar for nearly ten years,” he explained. The woman in the painting looked a lot like Gregor – and Ivan's own mother. If they'd had a daughter, perhaps, five hundred years ago. “Technically her younger brother Alexei was ruler, but he died under what is officially recorded as 'mysterious circumstances' and is generally agreed upon as 'dying from stroke and his body being hidden by his two sisters for the good of the Empire'.”

There was another muffled noise of amusement and Ivan was tempted to give his audience a grin, except he was supposed to be pretending they weren't there and weren't listening and definitely not recording this entire thing for Xav's parents to watch later. If they weren't watching on ImpSec's cameras, now.

No, they were supposed to be giving their older son attention to make up for the ignobility of Niklas having to share his parents with a sibling, so they'd probably watch the recording later. Which Ivan was not supposed to know about.

He proceeded to tell Xav all about his ancestor, how she and her youngest sister had their brother's body hidden in a root cellar for ten years, pretending that he'd partially recovered from his stroke and was bed-ridden. They told everyone how it was so hard for him to talk that no one but his sisters could understand him and that he got upset at seeing strangers, due to understandable paranoia, that anyone not family or their trusted advisor – a man who was coincidentally in love with and extremely dedicated to Princess Mora – was permitted to see Alexei.

The closest male relative to the throne, at the time, had been a thirteen year old boy who suffered from temper tantrums and whose mother was, by all accounts, a complete horror. When the princesses were finally found out, Mora had had a son whom everyone was glad to crown the Emperor with Mora serving as Regentess until he turned 18.

Of course before then, there had been suspicions and all manner of people tried to force their way into the inner bed chambers where Alexei was supposed to be, but somehow Princess Mora had managed to keep the ruse up for a decade. It had helped that she had been one of the most generous, kind, and successful rulers in Barrayaran history. So much better suited for rule than her brother, who had, by all reports, been not only politically incompetent, but also been more interested in riding his horse and going on hunting trips with his longtime-batman, with whom he'd been having an affair and causing great anguish about leaving _heirs_. All of which would have been fine if he'd let his sister take over and been content to be ruler in name only. But he'd refused, showing up once in awhile to his court to make laws that made no sense and ordering people who argued with him to be arrested, or sometimes hanged.

Ivan skipped that part in his re-telling to Xav, who had mumbled encouragingly about the part involving horses.

Xav was too young to really be told about most of the details, so the story was a lot shorter than it could have been. Ivan skipped the bit where Alexei and his batman had been caught doing something they shouldn't have been doing with a goat, though he alluded to it, just to see how well Lieutenant Vorholtz was doing back there, choking quietly at the high points of the story. 

To be fair, Ivan allowed, the goat incident was not the sort of thing that disqualified a man from being ruler on Barrayar, but he wasn't going to explain that to Xav either, not until he was much, much older. 

Princess Mora was one of Ivan's favorite relatives. She'd had to put up with a lot, being told all she had to offer the planet was being married off as a reward to a man from whom her brother wanted to get favors, with only the faintest hope that her son or grandson might someday inherit if Alexei proved unable to leave a living heir. Princess Mora had not married the man her brother chose, and he had unfortunately sprained a very delicate part of his anatomy the day he'd shown up to her quarters to declare himself. He'd called off his intention to marry anyone at all, and Mora had been left alone to do as she pleased. She'd reportedly pleased a great number of lovers, both men and women, and the paternity of her children had been up for debate for centuries. 

It had genuinely surprised many scholars when DNA science had confirmed that Mora's son was the grandchild of a Vorbarra. No one really wanted to ask where she'd gotten the...donation, as it were. There were cousins, of course, but Ivan knew there was a theory about Alexei and a freezer. But her son had been much the same as his mother – fair and generous and interested in justice rather than partying.

“She was a lot like your mother,” Ivan wrapped his story up. “Could have been CEO of a galactic business, if she'd had the opportunity. If your brother turns out to have a head for ruling the Empire and doesn't make you do it, you might get to join Toscane Industries and end up ruling some part of that if you want.”

Xav made a noise, a happy babble that said he'd discovered a dry spot on Ivan's shirt, or possibly that he was excited about becoming a galactic accountant. Ivan glanced down to see him grabbing Ivan's shirt in bunches and trying to lift it up to his mouth.

“I think it's time you had a real teether,” Ivan told him, disentangling his shirt and hefting Xav up a little higher against his shoulder.

His nanny stepped forward, holding out a small toy cat made out of soft fabric and filled with something soft and squishy – the best teether pediatric science could create, Ivan assumed. He took it and tried to get Xav's attention.

“Don't you think it would be more fun to chew on this?” he asked, as Xav bent himself down to reach Ivan's shirt. Ivan had to adjust his grip to try to make it harder for him to see what he wanted and held the cat out for Xav.

Xav frowned and stretched his hand past the cat for the spot of shirt he wanted.

Ivan bopped him lightly on the mouth with the cat. “Ooh, kitty, needs to be chewed on,” he offered, enticingly.

“Aaaa!” Xav insisted, knocking the cat out of Ivan's hand.

“Right.” Ivan sighed. “I'm going to teach you how to say 'Uncle Ivan' as your first words; you owe me.” He lifted up the hem of his shirt and offered it to the prince.

Xav took hold of it, then let go and pointed at the cat. Ivan sat down on the floor, picked up the cat, and they played 'I drop my toy and you pick it up' for awhile. 

~ ~ ~

Ivan was, in fact, invited to dinner. Niklas and Xav were both in bed and after being offered a clean, dry shirt, Ivan was directed to the Emperor's private dining room where he found Gregor and Laisa waiting. From the looks on their faces, they'd seen the video of his afternoon with their son.

Gregor was trying to look stern and unimpressed with Ivan's choice of education, while Laisa was wide-eyed with delight.

“Gregor told me the parts you weren't saying,” she said as soon as Ivan entered. “I need you to tell me all the stories you know. The history files I got from the Barrayaran University were nothing like that!”

Ivan nodded. “You got the clean, official version we usually show to visiting diplomats and foreign students. They wanted you to stay married to Gregor, not run screaming. If you want a really good education, you should ask my mother. She has stories even I don't know.”

“Oh, she tells me stories about when Gregor was little,” Laisa said, with a laugh. “And you,” she added with an evil grin.

Ivan stared at her in horror. “Then you should know she _lies._ You can't believe a word she says.” He looked over at Gregor for support, but Gregor was looking unamused with both of them and clearly resigned to his wife being privy to all kinds of stories that had escaped public record.

“Aunt Alys is as bad as you are,” Gregor told him.

“Well, yeah,” Ivan shrugged. “She raised me, where do you think I got it from?”

“I think we should all sit down for supper,” Gregor said, using his Emperor voice and clearly not really expecting them to listen. Ivan did twitch to sit down, but he stifled it so Laisa wouldn't giggle at him.

“Don't you at least get stories about Laisa from her parents?”

Gregor nodded, ruefully. “A few right after the wedding, but then it was time for them to leave and it isn't quite the same over messages. They have sent a lot of pictures – oh, Ivan, have you seen the one where she's dressed up like a kangaroo?”

Laisa shrieked, then leapt at her husband as he pulled a reader out of his jacket, and tried to wrestle the reader out of Gregor's hand. Ivan watched for a bit, seeing that neither was in danger of winning, and asked, “What's a kangaroo?”


End file.
